Moving on from Canvas

As you have read on our blog or in your inbox if you are a Canvas user, we’re no longer selling Canvas. It’s a good idea to start moving away from Canvas sooner rather than later. However, we want to make the transition process as easy as possible.

Canvas had a lot of features, and while it’s unlikely that a single other theme will have all of them in the same shape, we’re convinced that the majority of the features can be replaced by functions in another theme or by a plugin.

Below, we’ll list some of the features that were most vital to Canvas users, with a recommendation of how to transition.

Canvas has several templates: business, magazine and portfolio. Since the dawn of Canvas, literally 1000s of free and premium themes have found their way in the WordPress ecosystem. There are 100s of themes that could replace those specific templates.

We are committed to helping you choose though. While we’re hesitant to recommend themes out of the blue, we highly recommend having a look at all themes available on WordPress.com. You can view those here.

These themes are developed by our team and are used by thousands of other users. With a subscription to Jetpack Pro, you get access to 200+ themes, next to real-time backups, malware scanning, SEO tools and other things.

However, certain things can also be done with plugins. For example, Jetpack includes two custom post types you’ll recognize: Portfolio and Testimonials.

Our newer themes such as Storefront do not offer this functionality, but here’s plugin that can help you transition to another theme. That means that you can use Storefront or another theme and still use those shortcodes. You can download a plugin here to use this functionality in other themes.

You can use this plugin but we do recommend you to only use this during your transition to another theme, not as an end goal. Use it when starting with another theme, but then try to find ways to replace the shortcodes by theme or plugin functionalities. For example, many themes have styling for buttons already included. Find out how you can use that styling by your theme rather than using the shortcodes.

Canvas was also highly customizable through the hooks and filters available. There’s no easy way to migrate this customization.

However, we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for you, should you choose to migrate to Storefront by creating a hooks and filters reference for our flagship theme. Storefront has more hooks and filters than Canvas and is even more developer-friendly.

Finally, if you’re still uncertain; we’re always there to help. As our customer, while we can’t convert any customizations for you, we’re happy to provide advice and guidance on how to best transition to your next theme. We’ll happily help you with the right theme if you can tell us which of the features of Canvas you’ll miss the most.